Full transcript of “🔴 The BEST New Launcher for Firestick & Android TV?”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 If somebody told me that this is the home screen of their Fire Stick, I wouldn't believe them because I've never seen any Fire Stick looking like this. Well, you can see the home screen looks super clean. It's incredibly smooth. It works great on your Android TV, on your Google TV, on your Amazon devices. It's absolutely free. There's no subscriptions. There's no telemetry data. There's no adverts. There's no data logging. And when I tell you that the entire launcher is just over what, 2 megabytes in size, it really is something very impressive. So, in this video today, let me show you exactly how you can get this launcher on all of your devices. Then we can talk about what's the best way to install it, whether you're doing this on a Google TV or Android TV or a Fire TV device. So,
0:46 please do hit that like button so this video can go out to as many people as possible. Thank you, and let's jump straight into it. So, the launcher in question is called Couchy Launcher, and it was specifically designed to replace the ad-filled home screen that we're so used to on the Google TV devices, and now even of course these um Amazon devices. I think it's a big deal the fact that it's completely open source, so anybody can take the code, they can tweak it, they can enhance it, they can share it. All of that is available. And the fact that it doesn't contain any adverts, no telemetry, no login, none of that is needed. It really is just a fast, super light weight launcher that has built-in video support. So, let's open that up. Now, we can see as soon as you open it, it does take you to a built-in video
1:32 wallpaper. It's very easy to adjust, and you have lots of options depending on where you want to pull those videos from. So, let me give you a quick 1-minute overview of the launcher. So, I can press the context key, one of the three lines. Now, then take me to the menu. So, you've got your app section. You can modify your sections. You can change your layout of your display, whether you want a grid, like a floating dock, or you want carousel. All those options are available. This way you set the wallpaper. Now, you do have a status bar, so if I just press back for a second, you can see I've got a VPN indicator or VPN icon here, so I can click on that and this will then automatically launch my VPN of choice, and in my case, it is of course IPVanish. Here we see the connectivity indicator, and you can also go to the settings from here. Let's go back to that. Then you got other launcher
2:18 settings like the ability to back up all of your configuration to a file. You can then restore that configuration. And this will take you to your standard Android TV or your Fire TV settings. So, let's go to the apps. Say for example, you've got a list of all of your applications, and you have the ability to hide them. So, again, there's a so many pre-installed applications on these devices, so many things that we never open, never use, so why do I need to see them on my home screen? So, we can see here for example, if I don't want to see this application anymore, uh the Aurora store, I can click on this icon next to it, and that then instantly hides it. So, and you can then hide your applications, and you have the ability to uninstall from here as well. So, then you got the sections. So, this is really where you can customize how you want your layout
3:04 to look. So, for this demonstration, I've got a streaming section, then I was just adding some test sections. You can do so. Let's say for example, in your streaming section, you can click on that, and you can then choose which applications are inside that section. So, if I want to add an application into that, let's add in this uh app store. So, when I press back now, you can see that's then been added into that top line. Then you've got the uh display mode. So, this is really where you choose the style of home screen you want. So, at the moment, it's like a dock. If I press the right arrow, you can do a carousel, which basically the section stays fixed, then the icons scroll underneath it. Or you also have the option to have a grid. I personally like the um the floating dock mode because it really just allows you to have your main applications that you can see directly at the bottom. You can also appreciate
3:50 the wallpaper more because there's more space to see it. And then obviously when you want to go to the rest of your applications, you can just press down and you can see your big list list there. Every time I press back, it just takes me to that and I can then see the main applications I want to use on my device. So again, super clean, super fast. That's working great. Let's go back to the context key. Now the wallpaper, this I mean, you could just spend a long time here. So let's turn the video wallpapers off and let's go for a color gradient. That's now set. You can choose different presets here, sunset, charcoal, midnight. You can obviously pick a a photo from your USB drive. You can also pick a video if you've downloaded something you want personally, but I think by far the easiest way to do this is go to aerial videos. Let's click on that.
4:36 Then you got all of these built-in collections. So you got 18 in the community, too. So you got some nice view there, slowly panning over the the lake. 289 total video wallpapers. So And they're not very intrusive, so it's just something nice to keep moving in the background whilst you're browsing your applications and trying to find out the next app you're about to use. So that looks really good. Let's now press the home button so you can see on my Amazon device, it takes me here because I haven't actually configured the process to replace the home button with this custom launcher. So I've actually already covered this in a previous tutorial, so I don't want to go over the whole process again, but let me show you the tools that you need depending on which device you have. So let's open up Downloader. And we can now open up my website, which is just techdoctoruk.com, or you can always just type in the short code, which is just 53402.
5:24 And this will take you directly to my website, which again has been updated for the month of August with the best applications, the best utilities. And of course, if there's any application that you use find missing on my site, do leave me a message on the site. Let me know and I'll try to add it as quick as possible. Here we are. I can now browse over to get tools. I can scroll down. Make Make you read the disclaimer. And we have a section called launchers and tools. Let me click on that now. Here we can see. So, this is the brand new couch launcher. You can install that. Now, if you're doing this process on an Android TV device, and I will jump over to my Nvidia Shield in just a second. The other tool you need is a launcher manager for Android TV devices, and this was written by Sween Wolf. So, get those two. If you want to follow this process on an Amazon device,
6:10 then you need the Home One Fire instead. And this was actually updated a few days ago. So, if you're using the previous Make sure you do update it because the new version has some bug fixes and some other enhancements. So, that's the tools you need. Now, in terms of the actual step-by-step instructions, I will leave them in a pinned comment below. There's actually a blog post on my site. I'll also link the last video where I go into details on the exact steps you need to follow for the Amazon devices. Let's do Android TV and Google TV first because it's just super easy. So, again, install launcher manager for Android TV. Install your custom launcher. In this example, couch launcher, but of course, you can install any launcher that you like. Open up launcher manager. Make sure you've already activated USB debugging. If you're doing this on a Chromecast, on an Onn device, on a TiVo Stream. If you're doing this on an Nvidia Shield Pro, make
6:57 sure you turned on network debugging instead. Once you've done that inside your developer options. Once you've done that, you want to click on custom launcher options. Click on that. And where it says active launcher, let's change that. I can now choose my custom launcher of choice. So, let's go for couch launcher. That's now done. I can then press the select button here. So, this is now active. Let's press back one more time. And I can now click on enable custom launcher. And we can see now it says your current launcher is the couch launcher. So, when I press the home button, 3 2 1, we are now instantly taken to a couch launcher. Super fast. I quickly go to the settings. Go to wallpaper. And we can now very easily change these
7:43 video wallpapers as well as customize all of the other settings. And you can see on the video shield, everything's just super fast, super smooth. Now, for the Amazon devices, let's jump over there now. But essentially, it's a case of install these two applications, run one ADB command. Once you've done that, you then open up Home on Fire. At the top of it, you select your custom launcher. We can see I've already selected Couchy TV. Once you've done that, you then turn this button on. You press this select button here. Once you see that's activated, okay, that means now the next time you press the home button, as you can see, 3 2 1 go, it will take you instantly to your custom launcher. And we can see it's done exactly that. Now, when you are following this process on a Fire OS 7 device, you will see a short delay,
8:29 maybe 2 seconds, 3 seconds before you see your home screen. But once you've gone past that, you can go ahead and enjoy a super fast, super lean custom launcher, which works great on all of these devices. So, wrapping up, guys, lots of you may be asking, "But should I use this one? Or why is it better than Project Ivy?" Now, Project Ivy is definitely one of the best launchers for Android TV devices. It's feature-rich, does have some good options. But on the negative side, there is a premium tier. It's not open source. And obviously, it is quite heavy in terms of footprint. So, for maybe slower devices or older Android TVs, it may not be the best option. Whereas with Couchy Launcher, you've seen it's a brand new launcher. It's completely open source, has those built-in video wallpapers, has a modern design, it's super lean, super fast, is
9:16 actively developed. So, I do think it's definitely worthwhile checking out if you are looking for a new launcher or if you want to spice up your home screen. If you want to speed things up, definitely do go ahead and check out Couchy Launcher on all of your devices. So, that's pretty much it for this video, guys. Many thanks for watching. I will leave links to the blog post and also the previous video where you can watch in detail how to actually set this if you are doing this for the first time. So, really appreciate your support. Do like and share this video and I'll hopefully catch up with you guys real soon. Thanks.
